This post is an expansion on something I discussed in my talk at

Because you’re probably already doing this, possibly twice, in other parts of your process. If you use a popular SEO suite — preferably Moz Pro, of course, but it’s not just us — this data is very likely already baked into any suggestions you’ve downloaded. Save yourself the manual data collection (or worse yet, the unreliable and finickety SERP scraping on your own personal computer) and just collect this valuable information once.

Similarly, if you’re mainly looking for keywords you ought to rank for rather than the wide open ocean of opportunity, you’ll get 90%+ of that by seeing who your competitors are, and what they rank for that you don’t.

It really doesn’t have to be some massive ordeal. Again, this is about spending more time on the important bit, and less time on the grunt work.

The wrong metrics

“The important bit”, though, is probably prioritization, which means it’s probably about metrics.

Typically, the primary metric involved in keyword research is search volume, and that’s probably unavoidable (although, not all search volumes are created equal — watch out for a Whiteboard Friday on this in the Autumn), but even the most accurate search volumes can miss the full story.

The core issue here is that click-through rates for keywords vary massively. The below range is for a random sample from MozCast:

The chart shows that only around a third of the keywords in this random set had a CTR close to 100% for all organic results combined. It also shows the high variance in total CTRs across the keywords in this group.

This is not untypical, and well-discussed in the SEO space at this point. Many SERPs have organic results that start essentially below the fold. What it means for keyword research is that volume is not that great a metric. It’s an important component — you need both volume and CTR to work out how many clicks might be available — but on its own, it’s a little suspect.

Again, this doesn’t have to be a massive ordeal, though, many tools, including Moz Pro, will give you CTR estimates for your keywords. So in the same place you get your volumes, you can get a metric that will stop you prioritizing the wrong things, or in other words, stop you further wasting your time.

TL;DR: stop wasting your time

There’s a huge amount of skill, nuance, and experience that comes into keyword research that I’ve not covered here. But my hope is that we can get into the habit of focusing on those bits, and not just screaming into the void spreadsheet.